In blood test departments of hospitals, clinics, and other medical institutions, blood sampling staff (such as nurses) sample and store blood of patients into blood sampling tubes, and transport the blood sampling tubes to the test department. For blood tests, blood sampling tubes of various types are prepared in accordance with items of the blood tests. Normally, tests of various types are carried out simultaneously for each patient. Thus, blood sampling tubes of a plurality of types are automatically prepared for each of the patients by a blood sampling tube preparation apparatus. In addition, it is a common practice that a large number of patients are treated in a blood sampling room, and labels each printed with a barcode containing information items of a patient, a blood test, and the like are pasted to the blood sampling tubes prepared by the blood sampling tube preparation apparatus.
Further, at the time of reception of blood sampling, blood sampling reception tickets each printed with a barcode indicating, for example, a receipt number are issued to the patients. At the time of blood sampling operation, contents of those labels or reception tickets are read by an optical device such as a barcode reader. In this way, the patients and their blood sampling tubes are prevented from being mistakenly switched with each other.
As a technology for automating such blood sampling work and assisting the blood sampling work, a technology as disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is known. In the technology disclosed in Patent Literature 1, a drive device for driving and rotating an endless belt in a vertical direction (perpendicular direction) is utilized. In this belt drive device, a belt width is set to be equal to or larger than a longitudinal dimension of blood sampling tubes. Caterpillar-like partition plates are provided so as to project in an outer diameter direction from a belt surface, and a compartment on the belt surface between each pair of the partition plate on a front side and the partition plate on a rear side is used as a single blood sampling tube receiving portion (stock portion). In this way, a large number of the blood sampling tube receiving portions are formed on a single belt surface. In this case, a single belt drive device is configured to receive blood sampling tubes of the same type. Further, stocker mechanisms that utilize belt drive devices for receiving blood sampling tubes with such a caterpillar configuration are arranged so as to overlap with each other in a plurality of stages in upper and lower directions. With this, blood sampling tubes of a plurality of types can be handled.
Based on blood sampling ordering information from doctors, blood sampling tubes that are necessary for sampling blood of patients are taken out from corresponding blood sampling stocker mechanism portions. Using label printing-and-pasting means, information items of blood sampling from the patients are printed onto labels, and the printed labels are pasted to the taken-out blood sampling tubes. Then, the blood sampling tubes for each patient, to which the labels are pasted, are transported by delivery means to a blood sampling tube collection portion, and are received into a tray in the blood sampling tube collection portion.
In such a blood sampling tube preparation apparatus, the stocker mechanism portions are arranged so as to vertically overlap with each other. Thus, a dimension in a height direction is considerably large, which causes a problem of an increase in size of the apparatus itself. In addition, in order to handle the blood sampling tubes of the plurality of types, there is no other way than to expand respective caterpillars in a horizontal direction. As a result, a horizontal width of the entire apparatus becomes significantly larger, which causes a problem of a difficultly in employment in medical institutions due to space limitations.
Meanwhile, as a method of solving the related-art problems described above, a technology of the blood sampling tube preparation apparatus is known as disclosed in Patent Literature 2. In the technology disclosed in Patent Literature 2, which is previously filed by the inventors of the present invention, a test tube holding member is arranged along and on an inside of reciprocating belts of a single conveyor belt so that a lower end surface of a cap of each test tube is supported with the test tube holding member and an upper end surface of the forward feeding belt. In addition, the test tubes are fed by the forward feeding belt through intermediation of the caps. Using such a stocker, test tubes of a single type can be conveyed with a test tube conveying apparatus of a single type, and hence the number of conveying apparatus can be suppressed to the requisite minimum. Further, a width of each of the stockers is only several centimeters, and hence there is an advantage in that, even in a case where stockers of a plurality of types are arrayed correspondingly to test tubes of various types, an overall width dimension can be set significantly smaller than those in the related art.